You play a key role in making sure your employees know if their RRSP contribution room is affected by a pension adjustment (PA). Amended pension adjustment statements (APAs) will be arriving by late June to distribute to your employees. Find out what to do and when.

Why this matters for your employees

The PA amount represents the value of pension benefits earned in a registered pension plan during a calendar year, based on a formula provided by Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). Pension Corporation calculates PA amounts on behalf of our employers. We send you this important information to distribute to your employees. If we provide you with electronic PAs or APAs, you will need to submit the amounts to CRA and then share them with your employees.

Twice a year, in June and December, we might send you APAs to distribute to some of your employees. An APA is a PA that's been recalculated to reflect new information received about a member's pensionable service or salary. Purchasing a leave of absence or arrears can also generate an APA.

Questions

Reminder: distribute the Member's Benefit Statement and Report to Members to Teachers' Pension Plan members by June 29

The Pension Benefits Standards Act requires that each Teachers' Pension Plan member receive their Member's Benefit Statement (MBS) and Report to Members within 180 days after the plan's fiscal year-end.

What you need to do

BC Mail Plus will deliver the MBS and Report to Members package directly to you by mid-June. You must distribute this important pension information to your employees who are members of the Teachers' Pension Plan by June 29, 2017.

Encourage plan members to get their pension information online

Members can:

View their MBS faster through My Account:

Log on to My Account with username and password

Click Benefit Statement

Choose the year

View the MBS as a PDF or print it

Use the online pension estimator available through My Account to calculate pension estimates

Sign-in trouble?

If members forget their username or password, or have trouble signing in, they can click Problems signing in? next to the sign-in button. Those who have never been on My Account must click Register Now to proceed.

A sleek, new Welcome to the Plan package for members

Welcoming your employees who become plan members is an important milestone—for you and them.To help them learn more about securing the benefit of a lifetime, we've redesigned their welcome package. Learn more.

LTD Policy Validation

Staying current—validate your group disability information this October

In October, you will be asked to use the online LTD Policy Validation tool to verify that our records reflect your current group disability plan information. This will ensure your plan members receiving long-term disability (LTD) benefits from an approved group disability plan are correctly earning pensionable and contributory service.

To make the validation process easier, before accessing the tool in October, gather the following information:

Current group disability plan(s); if needed, contact your LTD carrier for this information

LTD policy effective date(s)

LTD policy number(s)

Which employee classes the LTD policy applies to

LTD policy termination date(s) for policies that have terminated since October 2016

LTD policy information for policies that have changed since they were approved

Even if this is your first time using the LTD Policy Validation tool, you'll find it's easy! To assist you, we will provide instructions and other details about this online tool in the fall newsletters.

E-remit pointers

Correctly making an E-Remit adjustment

Do you need to update your remittance with information about an employee? Check out the E-Remittance How-to for a few helpful pointers.

Does your employee now have a permanent social insurance number?

When updating the new SIN, do not create a new Plan Member Record.

If you have an employee who now has a permanent social insurance number (SIN), but had an immigration SIN when enrolled in the plan, please let us know.You'll need to update their new SIN. It's easy—just follow these directions.

Why this is important

The immigration SIN provided when they were enrolled in the plan is no longer valid.

Want to host a free member education workshop this fall 2017 or spring 2018?

If you have 20–35 employees, we can bring a free workshop to you this fall! We are taking workshop requests for fall 2017 and spring 2018. The schedule fills up fast and requests are reviewed on a first come, first served basis.

You and your employees can experience the advantages of free member education workshops without leaving town. You just need to provide a suitable room with a projection screen.

What are the changes?

A single simplified employee and employer rate will replace the differentiated rates

What you need to do

Review your payroll system:

Check if updates are needed to process the new rate

Ensure contributions continue for employees who reach 35 years of pensionable service on or after January 1, 2018

Restart contributions January 1, 2018, for employees who reached 35 years of pensionable service on or before December 31, 2017

We recently sent school districts a list identifying employees who will reach 35 years of service in 2017, along with a copy of the letter the employees will receive. After we receive confirmation of employees reaching 35 years of service, we will send affected employees a letter reminding them contributions will restart in 2018.

Please share this information with the appropriate contacts in your organization.

Earlist unreduced retirement age

Earliest retirement age changing in the 2016 Member's Benefit Statement?

The 2016 Member's Benefit Statement is based on two sets of rules covering the period before plan design changes take effect January 1, 2018, and afterwards. If members see a change in their earliest unreduced retirement age (from their 2015 Member's Benefit Statement), they should consider using the pension estimator to calculate their pension benefit amount at various ages—their pension value may have increased as well.

Health and dental coverage changes

Retiring teachers and their new extended health care and dental coverage provider

It’s the time of year when many teachers are nearing retirement. You may be getting a lot of questions from your teachers about their health coverage from Green Shield Canada, the plan’s new extended health care and dental coverage provider.

Please let these teachers know where on the plan website they can learn more: